Despite comments made by former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, who got ousted from the company last month, Intel will not kill off its discrete graphics business. “We are very committed to the discrete graphics market and will continue to make strategic investments in this direction,” Intel’s new co-CEO Michelle Johnston Holthaus just told an audience in the company’s CES 2025 keynote. She says it’s a question she gets a lot.
Gelsinger was incredibly blunt on a recent earnings call that the company’s radically different Lunar Lake laptop processors were something of a failed experiment from a financial perspective, and suggested there’d be “less need” for the company’s investments in discrete graphics too: “How are we handling graphics? That is increasingly becoming large, integrated graphics capabilities, so less need for discrete graphics in the market going forward.”
But weeks later, Intel finally notched its first win in the discrete GPU space with the Intel Arc B580 graphics card, selling out of the budget gaming card most everywhere.
Now, it’s possible Holthaus’ new statement is code for “we’re retreating, but slowly and less overtly,” as her overall tone in this morning’s keynote was exceedingly upbeat despite Intel’s recent troubles. She also celebrated the Lunar Lake chip, and called 2024 “the year Intel really reasserted ourselves as the leader in this AI PC market” on its performance and battery life strengths, even though the company’s just announced Arrow Lake chips, and upcoming Panther Lake chips, are built differently.
(Holthaus reiterated that Panther Lake will launch in the second half of the year, and says samples are already shipping to all its major customers.)
Intel’s future “strategic investments” could also be in the AI space rather than gaming ones, similar to how AMD and Nvidia have refocused their efforts recently on the huge opportunity there.
There is at least one more gaming card coming soon, though. Holthaus says Intel will launch its next, already-announced B570 GPU this next week, a card which is even more budget than the B580.
